Online holiday shopping has become a retail phenomenon, with 2014 Cyber Monday sales projected to reach $2.6 billion, according to the Adobe Digital Index. With more and more consumers utilizing their mobile devices to search online for the best deals and sales offers, many marketers are optimizing their local search strategies by implementing best practices in organic search.
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Locally targeted ad spending by U.S. national brands is projected to grow from $54.4 billion in 2014 to $68.9 billion in 2018, according to BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. Local Media Forecast. More than two-thirds of the brands surveyed by BIA/Kelsey say they already invest in local marketing initiatives.
Consumer demand for online local information is driving much of this growth. Four in five consumers now use search engines to find local information, according to Understanding Consumer Local Search Behavior, a research report published by Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Purchased in May 2014. The vast majority of those consumers – 88 percent – search on their smartphones.
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Mobile devices now represent one-quarter of global Internet use; mobile search accounts for one-third of all search. Perhaps even more important for search marketers, nearly 80 percent of local searches on mobile devices turn into purchases, and almost 90 percent of those purchases are made in a physical store, according to comScore research
sponsored by Neustar Localeze and 15miles.
Creating a relevant, compelling online user experience across digital screens is critical for capturing this growing search audience. This whitepaper explores the importance of delivering optimized user experiences by screen size, as well as the steps necessary for developing an effective mobile and local SEO strategy. The whitepaper presents local SEO best practices for desktop, tablet and mobile users, including examples from national home security brand ADT’s mobile search initiatives.
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If one were to summarize the current landscape in a sentence, a quote from Jeff Beard (SVP, General Manager for Neustar Localeze) does it nicely:

What we can clearly see is that the local search market is maturing – what we previously described as a Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo) revolution is now embedded in consumer behavior.

The touchpoints for local search stretch from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, to apps like Yelp and See Green, right through to maps and a huge range of local directories. This presents significant opportunity for integrating local search efforts with influencer retargeting. By identifying and tracking these brand influencers, companies can in turn measurably
increase the effectiveness of search efforts from mobile devices to desktops.
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The power of social media

Every 60 seconds, there are more than 510,000 new Facebook comments, more than 98,000 new Tweets, more than 600 new YouTube videos, 3,400-plus new Instagram images uploaded, 694,000 new search queries, and 168 million new emails.
This adds up to an overwhelming amount of activity from consumers in social media channels, but also to a great deal of noise that marketers need to deflect or rise above in order to reach consumers with the right message at the right time.
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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, sales in 2012 from eCommerce were $186 billion, and sales at physical stores in the U.S. totaled $4.3 trillion.*
As a growing number of local networks and directories appear in the local search ecosystem, multilocation businesses and big brands are challenged to accurately optimize and distribute their business listing information. It is vital to local businesses and national brands alike to have placement not just in the search engines, but to understand how each data aggregator can enhance distribution efforts and to embrace social marketing opportunities. To assist with automating these challenges, there are a number of best practices, analytics and automation tools available to marketers that will be described in this report.
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Whether you call it content marketing, inbound marketing or convergence marketing, the new era of digital marketing has arrived. It is driven by carefully planned, well crafted and expertly promoted content. Where does that leave the SEO experts of the past? Where does that leave the technical experts who have survived and thrived amid the constant search engine shifts, updates and technology
enhancements?
When positioned correctly, SEO strategists and practitioners are increasingly having a larger voice in telling the marketing story. By using big data—keyword research, transactional data and social data—to inform not just search engine optimization, but content strategy and creation, the SEO team offers a unique combination of customer understanding and technical expertise to lead content-driven success.
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Marketers today are faced with the challenge of capturing consumers’ attention in an “ad blind” world where most advertising is largely ignored. Instead, consumers now rely mostly on search engines and social networks to get information about brands, products, and services – making it critical to “show up” in organic search results.
In this increasingly social environment , the most strategic way to improve organic search rankings is to create “shareworthy” social content, and then encourage, track, and measure sharing. By decoding content marketing strategy to enable “social signals” and engagement, marketers can dramatically improve their organic search rankings and reach more relevant consumers than ever before.
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The future of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for International Business: Some 73% of online activity is related to local content and 50% of local searches result in purchases with 90% of Internet users preferring online content in their native language. These statistics are compelling for companies that have a local presence and diacritics and special characters are core to many cultures businesses communications. International marketers now have the ability to talk to the newest emerging markets in their own language.
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Earned media can deliver great value to marketers and the brands they work for; it expands and extends the impact of paid and owned media and improves marketing results. Up to 70% of the visitors to any campaign site come from Social Sharing. Social visitors, those who come via sharing, convert up to four times higher than conventional visitors. But, until now it has been difficult to approach earned media and social sharing in a measurable, predictable and repeatable way… it has been much more a craft than science, but it doesn’t have to be that way!
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